Robocraft: Forgot A Step

November 26, 2016

So I played Robocraft immediately after the Fast and Formidible update last week. Since this update changes the behavior of the charger block, I expected it to prompt me to place the recharger on the hotbar, since it must now be activated when you want more energy.

Nope, no prompt. So I simply can’t use just the charger block, right? Nope! The entire hotbar is offline, meaning that I was unable to use any of the weapons that were working just fine the prior day. Um, someone who set up this update forgot a step, to allow players to, you know, play the game.

So there I was, stuck in a match with no weapons. Just a big, slow robot. All dressed up and nowhere to go. It was all I could do to “spot” (tag) enemy robots and place my robot in the way of the enemy weapons and otherwise make myself a decoy target. Fortunately, I think my team still managed to win. I suspect many players on the opposing team encountered the same situation I did, where our weapons were simply offline for the whole match.

As expected, going into build mode, subtracting a weapon and re-adding it brought up the hotbar and everything went back to normal. I joined another match and found that I could fire weapons and do all the game-play stuff once again.

The modification to the Fast and Formidible update that changed the behavior of the charger block was unexpected. You get to use it once, and then waiting for it to recharge takes significantly longer than it takes enemy robots to tear me apart when I have once again run dry on weapon energy.

Another change on this update is that there is now significantly more “CPU” per level, which basically means that you can now attach more stuff to your bot. This is good, and probably long overdue. I now have my bot covered in a lot more shield plating. I doubt this will help much. I probably need to go back to robot-edit mode, strip off some shield plates, and tack on a repair beam or two in support of my team. There have been a number of times that I have encountered damaged teammates, and all I could do was try to destroy their attackers before my teammate was wiped out. Usually I will fail to protect them.

I’ll need to read more about this update, to take advantage of other changes. At this point, I’m playing at a disadvantage, with a less-efficient bot.